till the war is over before I write about it, it's very likely I shall
recollect only trivial details, and the big heroic spirit of the thing
will escape me. There's only one way of recording an impression--catch
it while it's fresh, vivid, vital; shoot it on the wing. If you wait
too long it will vanish." It was because he felt in this way that he
wrote in red-hot haste, sacrificing his brief leave to the task, and
concentrating all his mind upon it.

There was one impression that he was particularly anxious to
record,--his sense of the spiritual processes which worked behind the
grim offence of war, the new birth of religious ideas, which was one
of its most wonderful results. He had both witnessed and shared this
renascence. It was too indefinite, too immature to be chronicled with
scientific accuracy, but it was authentic and indubitable. It was
atmospheric, a new air which men breathed, producing new energies and
forms of thought. Men were rediscovering themselves, their own
forgotten nobilities, the latent nobilities in all men. Bound together
in the daily obedience of self-surrender, urged by the conditions of
their task to regard duty as inexorable, confronted by the pitiless
destruction of the body, they were forced into a new recognition of
the spiritual values of life. In the common conventional use of the
term these men were not religious. There was much in their speech and
in their conduct which would outrage the standards of a narrow
pietism. Traditional creeds and forms of faith had scant authority for
them. But they had made their own a surer faith than lives in
creeds. It was expressed not in words but acts. They had freed their
souls from the tyrannies of time and the fear of death. They had
accomplished indeed that very emancipation of the soul which is the
essential evangel of all religions, which all religions urge on men,
but which few men really achieve, however earnestly they profess the